Was listening to Anil Menon from IBM giving a lecture about his life's lessons. When he was talking about ethics in the business world today, he said the guys from Enron did not start their day thinking they were going to swindle the stock holders. The mistakes just add up. Problem with the Enron culture was that it condoned small ethical mistakes and they just added up. Mr. Menon actually challenged the audience to show how many had totally true resumes.
I owe up. My resume is a homogeneous mixture (that is the language you pick up if you are married to a chemcial engineer) of truth, half truth, half lies and blatant never-even-heard-of-it-but-will-add-it-in-my-resume lies. I do not have the courage to take it out of my resume because I know everyone else has them too and don't want to be penalized for my ethical awakening. (Reminded of a friend who took TCS' interview test without cheating and failed. All the 400+ people, who cleared it cheated.)
I am pretty sure I won't have another chance to correct that. I have to live by my lies. Can add to the lies but can't undo a past lie. (Pretty sure the computer folks have a name for this, like ROM, SROM RRAM, PROM, PERFORM or whatever...)
Of course they will add up and by the time I am fifty I would have added up more of them than stock options. Is this not what happened in the Enrons too? - That you have to live by your lies and there is an escalation of commitment.
Reminded of a good old tamil proverb "oru poiyai maraikka onpathu poi solli..."
Friday, September 29, 2006
Why do we translate old to good?
Was at a presentation of Johnson & Johnson and of course, with in the first two slides came their credo.
For those of you does not what the J&J credo is - I sentence you to be deepfried in J&J baby oil 'ennai kopparai' - here is a crash course on their credo. The credo is like a mission statement for J&J and was written 130 years back by the founder. It is famous for putting their customers - doctors, nurses and patients - before shareholder.
This presenter was talking about how every action they have taken in the last 130 years ties back to the credo and that it has not changed at all. Don't get me wrong, I admire J&J as a company but I can't help thinking is it good bad to follow somethin for 130 years and more so because it is 130 years old and unchanged? Can you live by a document that was written a century back. Has not the world changed since then?
Sure we live by a lot of documents that are written a lonnnnng time back! US Constitution, ten commandments or Baghavat Gita. I do agree the people who wrote them had a lot of wisdom but should we not give to the genearations that came by since then, a chance.
what if the people who wrote them were conditioned by their biases. For workplace discrimination claims in US, 'a communist party member' is still a legal defense. (remnants from the McCarthy era). I am pretty sure a lot of Indians think the founding fathers were wrong about religion based civil codes, reservation systems or property rights in Kashmir.
How do we correct these? I dont want to correct every document that is more than ten years old. But I would be comfortable knowing there is a mechanism to correct this and that historic errors do not have to accumulate and carry over.
Post Script: To J&J's credit they did revisit their credo at least once. They included fathers as one of their customer groups - when talking about baby care - because men's involvement in baby care has become more active since it was written.
For those of you does not what the J&J credo is - I sentence you to be deepfried in J&J baby oil 'ennai kopparai' - here is a crash course on their credo. The credo is like a mission statement for J&J and was written 130 years back by the founder. It is famous for putting their customers - doctors, nurses and patients - before shareholder.
This presenter was talking about how every action they have taken in the last 130 years ties back to the credo and that it has not changed at all. Don't get me wrong, I admire J&J as a company but I can't help thinking is it good bad to follow somethin for 130 years and more so because it is 130 years old and unchanged? Can you live by a document that was written a century back. Has not the world changed since then?
Sure we live by a lot of documents that are written a lonnnnng time back! US Constitution, ten commandments or Baghavat Gita. I do agree the people who wrote them had a lot of wisdom but should we not give to the genearations that came by since then, a chance.
what if the people who wrote them were conditioned by their biases. For workplace discrimination claims in US, 'a communist party member' is still a legal defense. (remnants from the McCarthy era). I am pretty sure a lot of Indians think the founding fathers were wrong about religion based civil codes, reservation systems or property rights in Kashmir.
How do we correct these? I dont want to correct every document that is more than ten years old. But I would be comfortable knowing there is a mechanism to correct this and that historic errors do not have to accumulate and carry over.
Post Script: To J&J's credit they did revisit their credo at least once. They included fathers as one of their customer groups - when talking about baby care - because men's involvement in baby care has become more active since it was written.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
What's up with the name?
I have bitten the bait finally... have started blogging... at least planning to ...
For those of you wondering , 'what's up with the title anyway? I am pretty sure people like Sai are thinking what does he mean 'dick of fire'? or others like Mahesh - my Brother in law - are thinking anything Malayalam is my domain and how can he use a mallu name.
I take a lot of inspiration from Bharathiyar. His dream was to discover an 'embryo of fire - aghini kunju' to burn up everything he does not like in the world and dance the final dance of destruction. My intention is not to burn up the world, or even parts of it. but I do like to throw a small fire ball once in a while... at the least it can illuminate some things ... things that bother me... things that made me wince and things that made me think... or things that made me smile.
As I wrote in one of my kavithai's a long time back...
... 'It's not a guy's thing to cry
but my pen's got no gender
and I like the luxury to cry
and laugh thru my pen...'
Loking forward to the journey
For those of you wondering , 'what's up with the title anyway? I am pretty sure people like Sai are thinking what does he mean 'dick of fire'? or others like Mahesh - my Brother in law - are thinking anything Malayalam is my domain and how can he use a mallu name.
I take a lot of inspiration from Bharathiyar. His dream was to discover an 'embryo of fire - aghini kunju' to burn up everything he does not like in the world and dance the final dance of destruction. My intention is not to burn up the world, or even parts of it. but I do like to throw a small fire ball once in a while... at the least it can illuminate some things ... things that bother me... things that made me wince and things that made me think... or things that made me smile.
As I wrote in one of my kavithai's a long time back...
... 'It's not a guy's thing to cry
but my pen's got no gender
and I like the luxury to cry
and laugh thru my pen...'
Loking forward to the journey
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